Memory is not solid ground on which we stand. It is a fragile fabric of the visible and the hidden, of what is told and what remains unspoken. In this exhibition, the artist Julia Scholl (*1992) embarks on a poetic archaeology of her own family history, which simultaneously touches on universal questions of memory, identity, loss, and transgenerational trauma.
At the center of the work is the artist’s relationship with her grandmother, a woman whose life story reflects the fate of many German-speaking families in Eastern Europe. Born in Bessarabia, a region that shifted between Romanian and Soviet occupation, the grandmother was resettled in 1940 as part of the Hitler-Stalin Pact. The family had to leave their home with the promise of continuing their accustomed life in occupied Poland. A brief, rarely told period followed in Kornfelde (today Polanowice), before the family fled from the Red Army in January 1945 to southern Germany.
It is a story of uprooting, loss, and flight – shared by many people in 20th-century Europe.
Edition: 80
Künstlerin: Julia Scholl
Kuratorin: Lilli Roser
Gestaltung: Melissa Cagatay